Shibori Workshop - Oh! What! Fun!

Marge told us all about Shibori Dyeing during her presentation at our August meeting.  We were captivated by the details and inspired by her samples.  She really got us excited for our workshop.

The workshop started with fabric folding and manipulation instructions. We each received a kit that had prepared fabric and  a variety of items we could use on our fabric. Aside from our kits, Marge had TONS of additional stuff for us to use.

The fabric Marge provided was all ready for dyeing. 

Some of us prepared our own so we'd have more to play with.

A good two hours of boiling in water with some Washing Soda does the trick. That's NOT the same as baking soda but it is made by Arm & Hammer.  Look for it in the laundry detergent aisle.  Not all stores carry it but I did find it in Meijer.  You can read more about fabric prep here.

Here are some of us waiting for our first pieces to come out of the dye vats - those are the yellow, green, and blue covered buckets at the bottom of the picture. The other buckets had water as you need to soak your piece first and get it nice and wet before you put it in the dye.  Marge had trays for us to put our wet pieces on.  They came out of the dye GREEN!  As the air hits the dye it gradually turns a beautiful blue.  At that point you really want to open it and see what you got.  Nope.  It has to go back in the dye, out and oxidize, then all over again for a third time.  Patience.  It was worth it.  After 3 dips/soaks, you rinsed your piece in water.  

And then, the best part, the reveal!

 

 I think this one of Cari's was done with blocks of wood (?) and clamps (?)

 Karen's is from marbles wrapped with rubberbands.

 Kathleen's was stacked flat stones wrapped with rubberbands.

 Do you see Annette holding a tray of balls?  Her reveal...

Annette's large fabric piece - large balls wrapped with rubberbands.

 A circle of straight lines! (popsicle sticks?)

I don't know how Sue achieved this result but the diagonal stripes 

combined with the clearly defined steps in intensity are pretty cool.

 And the diagonal irregular stripes on Meg's - wow!

The pièce de résistance belonged to Cari, who spent a good part of the day before the workshop on its creation.  We called it the wedding cake.  She couldn't open it before we were finished just because it figured to be very time consuming, so we begged her to share a picture when she did her reveal at home.  

Here is the beginning

Mid-construction... it's growing! 

And it's ready to dye.

Do you see why we called it the wedding cake?

After a dye or two.

The cake is sitting in the air soaking up oxygen, turning from green to blue.

And, finally, the reveal!

 Yowza! Beautiful!

It was a great day.

 Oh, did we make a mess!  But we had so much fun!

 Hey, look at those clean, pretty toes at the edge of our huge mess.

All of our work sure made for a pretty clothesline.  

It seemed we all wanted a picture of it.  You can see how some of the pieces that were green in the reveal pictures changed to blue as they spent more time exposed to oxygen.  

It's fun trying to figure out how some of the designs were created. 

Marge was kind enough to let us keep a vat of dye if we wanted as the dye can stay good for about a week.  That meant they were a couple more individual dyeing sessions during the week.

Kathleen had a mini session during the Wednesday sew in.

 A couple pieces ready to go into the dye vat.

An experiment with white crayon as resist.  It worked.

Kathleen's dye session 2 clothesline.

A couple days later Meg and Cari had a second session.

Their table looks filled with possibilities!

Meg's clothesline with her's and Cari's work for the day:

All that you can say is "WOW!"

It'll be fun to see all the quilts created with our Shibori dyed fabric at future Show & Tells.